DSL Collection

?From the Masses, For the Masses??? concerns China?s greatest determining factor: the directness of engaging with the people. In the public arena, people are defined as a cohesive mass of physical beings, of status and identity and language, and the process of openly engaging with the masses (in regards of history, experience, art and culture). This process gives rise to a cultural landscape that is at once uniform, different, and pluralistic."

Wang Jianwei

"It [in terms of Chinese history] seems to be cut off again and again and every time you start from zero. You choose to forget, to deny, and as a consequence everything becomes a source of anxiety.?

"A recent statement made by Wang Jianwei encapsulates the essence of the current frenzy with development in China. In the name of modernization, the appetite for economic progress in a highly accelerated setting derives many from obtaining a critical distance with that which is happening around them. The statement by artist Wang Jianwei on anxiety is not made on a pessimistic note; the total assault on our senses instead offers a rich theater for the proposal of new interpretations on time and space. Wang Jianwei?s practice are not mere therapeutic exercises for a society that has gone haywire, instead Wang?s project lies within redefining the role of artist within a broader social domain, provoking a necessary space for the critique of normalized situations, and fostering alternative forms of dialogue between artists and the public.
Wang Jianwei is an important figure within the contemporary Chinese art scene in that he is one of the very few artists who investigate the relationships among cultural production, society, power and knowledge. After having graduated from secondary school in 1975, Wang was sent to the countryside for re-education. During this period, he observed peasants? lives and their social conditions. During his study at the former Zhejiang Academy of Fine arts in Hangzhou from 1985 to 1987, Wang was heavily influenced by French existentialist figures such as Camus and Sartre. He soon came to question the adequacy of painting as a means of expressing his concepts. In 1991, Wang abandoned painting and began to experiment with new media and completed his first video in 1995. While not entirely interested in delivering a singular message to the audience, Wang states: ?I consider myself to be a sociological observer, in the same manner as when I worked within theatre. I am not interested to know if my work is perceived that of an artist or not, but it becomes as a form of experimentation in itself.?

The title of From the Mass, to the Mass (2000) was taken from the quotations by Mao Zedong. In the name of the people, the claim for an emancipatory socialist experiment presupposes a cohesive collective at the expense of denying the plurality of individuals.? Not entirely interested in representing such a binary opposition, Wang examines the issue of spatial control. Wang?s two channel video projections depict two public spaces: one of a public space outside of a generic building inside a city, the other is of students who are lined up outside in a playground to listen to a public announcement. Wang documents the children?s movement in slow motion. Their eyes are gazing back at the audience and their movements seem instrumentalized.
For the second projection, Wang tracks the magical movement of a deserted plastic bag in a public space which ascends from the ground by a sudden draft. The juxtaposition of the unpredictable movement of a fleeting vessel versus a strict regimentation of our behavior in an institution sheds light on the everyday lives as the remaining site for freedom."
David Ho Yeung Chan,